164 Fun Facts About Natural Disaster

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake struck on the morning of which religious feast?

All Saints' Day had filled Lisbon's churches, which collapsed on worshippers at morning Mass; survivors who fled to the open docks were then caught by a tsunami.

Which 1759 satire sends its naive hero through the Lisbon earthquake?

Candide's tutor Pangloss insists all is for the best as Lisbon falls, and the Inquisition then hangs him at a ceremony staged to ward off further earthquakes.

Which fault ruptured in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake?

San Andreas ground shifts measured after 1906 led geologist Harry Reid to the elastic-rebound theory, still the main model of how faults store strain and then snap.

Which opera star sang Carmen in San Francisco hours before the 1906 earthquake?

Enrico Caruso was shaken awake in his hotel, hired a man with a cart to reach the Oakland ferry, and left the ruined city by train.

Which country lost the most lives in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, about 170,000?

Indonesia's Aceh province lay closest to the rupture, so waves more than 20 metres high arrived about 20 minutes after the quake, too soon for most people to flee.

The 2004 Boxing Day disaster holds which grim record?

Deadliest tsunami in history, partly because the Indian Ocean had no warning system: the waves took hours to cross it, yet almost every victim was caught by surprise.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan triggered which nuclear disaster?

Fukushima Daiichi survived the shaking, but the tsunami flooded its backup generators and cut the power for cooling, so three reactor cores melted within days.

Which country suffered the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, in 1960?

Chile's earthquake sent a tsunami across the whole Pacific that killed 61 people in Hawaii, some 10,000 km away.

Which Caribbean country was devastated by an earthquake near its capital in January 2010?

Haiti lost even the headquarters of the United Nations mission sent to help it: the building collapsed, killing the mission's chief and his deputy.

Which US city was 80% flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

New Orleans flooded because the levees and floodwalls built to protect it gave way in several places; water was still seeping through one breach a month later.

Katrina peaked at Category 5 over the Gulf, then struck Louisiana in 2005 at which weaker strength?

Category 3 by wind at landfall, yet the water Katrina drove ashore rose 25 to 28 feet along the Mississippi coast and pushed miles inland.

The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?

Galveston answered by jacking up more than 2,000 buildings, a 3,000-ton church among them, and pumping in sand to lift the city as much as 17 feet behind a new seawall.

Which former Beatle organised a 1971 benefit concert after the Bhola cyclone?

George Harrison acted on a plea from his friend Ravi Shankar, filling Madison Square Garden twice in one day with guests including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton.

Cyclone Nargis killed at least 138,000 people in 2008 in which country?

Myanmar's military rulers at first resisted large-scale foreign help and barred aid workers from the flooded delta, which slowed relief to the survivors.

Typhoon Haiyan devastated which country in November 2013?

The Philippines' chief delegate to UN climate talks that opened days later began a fast in solidarity with the survivors, and delegates from other countries joined him.

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa produced what record?

The loudest known sound in history crossed the Indian Ocean: people more than 4,500 km away, near Mauritius, took it for the gunfire of a distant ship.

Dust from Krakatoa's 1883 eruption gave the whole world months of unusually vivid what?

Sunsets glowed blood-red around the world for months; an astronomer has proposed that one over Norway is the sky in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

Which 1815 eruption is considered the most powerful in recorded history?

Mount Tambora blew away about a third of its height, and the haze it threw into the upper air dimmed the sun enough to cool the whole planet.

Which novel was begun during 1816's rainy 'Year Without a Summer'?

Frankenstein began when cold rain kept Mary Shelley and her friends indoors at Lord Byron's villa and Byron challenged each of them to write a ghost story.

Whose two letters give the detailed eyewitness account of the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius?

Pliny the Younger was invited to sail toward the eruption but chose to stay with his studies; his uncle, Pliny the Elder, went with the rescue ships and died on the shore.

Which Caribbean town was wiped out by the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée?

Saint-Pierre was a prosperous city that visitors likened to Paris; it never recovered, and Fort-de-France took its place as the island's commercial centre.

Mount St. Helens' eruption of 18 May 1980 began with what, the largest in recorded history?

A landslide carried off the volcano's bulging north flank, uncorking the pressurised magma inside so that the blast burst out sideways rather than straight up.

A volcano's mudflows buried the town of Armero in 1985 in which country?

Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz produced only a small eruption, but its heat melted snow and ice on the summit, and the meltwater rushed down the river valleys as mudflows.

Which great river burst its dikes at Wuhan in China's 1931 floods, among the deadliest disasters ever recorded?

Yangtze floodwater left refugees crowded onto scraps of dry ground with no sanitation, and the diseases that swept through them proved by far the flood's deadliest effect.

The Johnstown Flood of 1889 was caused by the failure of a dam owned by what?

A private sporting club of wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists had fitted screens across the dam's spillway to keep its stocked fish in; as the lake rose, workers tried to pull them free.

The North Sea flood of 1953 killed more than 300 people along the coast of which country?

England lost 307 people along its east coast in a single night, and the inquiry that followed recommended the movable flood barrier that now protects London.

The 1925 Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest in US history, killed most of its 695 victims in which state?

Illinois lost more than 500 people, 234 of them in Murphysboro, because the tornado crossed the state at over 60 mph, about twice a typical twister's pace.

Legend says the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began when which animal kicked over a lantern?

A cow in Catherine O'Leary's barn took the blame for more than a century, until the city council formally cleared her and the animal in 1997.

The name 'Dust Bowl' first appeared in news reports the day after which huge dust storm of April 1935?

Black Sunday overtook an Associated Press reporter on the road; his story the next day spoke of the 'dust bowl', and the name stuck to the whole region.

Which nickname was given to Dust Bowl migrants heading to California?

Okies was pinned on any poor migrant from the Southwest, Oklahoman or not: families from Arkansas and Missouri got the label too.

The Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009 killed 173 people in which Australian state?

Victoria had baked through a heatwave and a long drought, and the fires broke out on the day Melbourne recorded its highest temperature since records began in 1859.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?

Pudding Lane's blaze could have been boxed in early, but the Lord Mayor hesitated to pull down houses in its path; found later in the street, he cried 'Lord! what can I do?'

Which diarist climbed the Tower of London to watch the Great Fire?

Samuel Pepys carried the news to the King, then dug a pit in the garden to bury his wine and his Parmesan cheese out of the fire's reach.

Charles Richter devised his magnitude scale in 1935 to compare earthquakes in which US state?

California quakes within 600 km of one type of seismograph were all the 1935 scale could rate, so scientists now use other magnitude scales, though the old name lives on.

On the Richter scale, each whole-number step represents what increase in measured amplitude?

Tenfold in amplitude means far more in energy: each whole step releases about 32 times as much, so a magnitude 7 packs roughly 1,000 times the energy of a 5.

The Saffir-Simpson scale ranks a hurricane from Category 1 to 5 by which single measure?

Sustained wind speed alone sets the category: pressure and surge were dropped from the scale in 2010, and forecasters warn that even a Category 1 can bring deadly flooding.

Which 2018 hurricane hit the Florida Panhandle at Category 5, the strongest storm on record to strike that region?

Michael grew from a tropical depression to a Category 5 in about three days, then wrecked the beach towns around Mexico Beach and Panama City with wind and surge.

The Enhanced Fujita scale rates a tornado by what?

The damage it left is compared with a list of buildings and trees to estimate the winds, so every rating is an after-the-fact estimate rather than a measurement.

In US weather alerts, which message means a tornado has been sighted or picked up on radar?

A tornado warning means take shelter now; a watch, which covers a far larger area, says only that conditions are right for tornadoes to form.

Two US Air Force weather officers coined which nickname in 1952 as the title of a storm-research project?

Tornado Alley has never had official borders: the Weather Service has not defined it, and meteorologists' own glossary says the term has little scientific value.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan are named after which region?

Tōhoku's coast is dotted with old stones warning of past tsunamis; in one hamlet every home stood above a stone reading 'Do not build any homes below this point', and all survived.

Which organisation spent five months in Johnstown after the 1889 flood, building hotels to house the homeless?

The American Red Cross was led there in person by its founder, Clara Barton, who arrived within days with fifty helpers and did not leave until the autumn.

The 2004 tsunami crossed the whole Indian Ocean to strike which African country hardest?

Somalia lay thousands of kilometres from the earthquake, yet the waves killed some 200 people or more there and wrecked homes and fishing boats along 650 km of its coast.

What does the volcano name Anak Krakatau mean?

Child of Krakatoa took after its parent: in 2018 its flank slid into the sea and raised a tsunami that killed more than 400 people on nearby coasts.

Mount Pelée is on which Caribbean island?

Martinique's governor stayed in the threatened town with his wife after a committee of civic leaders declared its safety 'completely assured', three days before a planned election.

The Vesuvius eruption of AD 79 buried Pompeii and which other town?

Herculaneum was buried so hot and so deep that wood, food and papyrus charred instead of rotting, so beds, doors and a library of some 1,800 scrolls survive.

Peru's 1970 Ancash earthquake shook loose the world's deadliest avalanche from which peak, the country's highest?

Huascarán's north peak shed a mass of ice and rock that covered some 14 km in about three minutes, far too fast for the town of Yungay below to escape.

Crossing the deep ocean, a tsunami travels about as fast as what?

A jet airliner's pace, more than 800 km/h, yet out at sea the wave is rarely a metre high, so sailors do not notice it pass beneath them; it slows and rears up only near the shore.

The Bronze Age eruption of which Greek island's volcano is sometimes proposed as the source of the Atlantis legend?

Santorini's eruption buried the town of Akrotiri under ash and pumice, which preserved its three-storey houses and wall paintings for more than three thousand years.

What triggers about 90 percent of avalanche accidents?

The victims themselves, or someone in their party, trigger the slide nine times in ten, which is why skiers and climbers are taught to read a slope's warning signs first.

The deadliest wildfire in recorded history struck which Wisconsin town on 8 October 1871?

Peshtigo burned the same night as the Great Chicago Fire and killed several times as many people, yet Chicago, the bigger city, has taken the headlines ever since.

Townspeople who survived Wisconsin's 1871 firestorm spent the night standing in what?

A river ran through the burning town and people stood in it for hours as the firestorm passed, though some drowned and others died of cold in the chilly water.

Most victims of France's 2003 heat wave belonged to which group?

The elderly were hit hardest; the prime minister promised a review, and within a year France had a national heat plan with alerts and cooled rooms for seniors.

Which historic Hawaiian town was largely destroyed by a wildfire in August 2023?

Lahaina's landmark banyan tree, planted in 1873, was scorched but survived; it has since put out fresh leaves and become a symbol of the town's recovery.

By what nickname is the Great Blizzard of March 1888, which paralysed the US East Coast, also known?

The White Hurricane tore down the web of overhead telegraph and telephone wires, so New York and other cities began burying their lines underground.

Which New York skyscraper is struck by lightning about two dozen times a year?

The Empire State Building is forecasters' favourite answer to the saying that lightning never strikes twice: tall, pointed, isolated objects are hit again and again.

Which city beat New York to open America's first subway in 1897, spurred by the gridlock of the 1888 blizzard?

Boston's Tremont Street subway took streetcars off the snarled streets above; its tunnel is the oldest in North America and still carries Green Line trains.

The 1993 Storm of the Century formed over which body of water on March 12?

Gulf of Mexico origins meant Florida was struck too, by tornadoes and a deadly storm surge; forecasters had seen it coming five days ahead.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco area minutes before a game in which sporting event?

The World Series that year was an all-Bay Area affair, the Giants against the Athletics; the third game was called off as the stadium shook, and play resumed ten days later.

Whose handling of the 1927 Mississippi flood helped him win the presidency the next year?

Herbert Hoover, then Commerce Secretary, ran the relief effort, caring for more than 600,000 refugees, about half of them in tent camps, and it made his national reputation.

Which band reworked the flood blues 'When the Levee Breaks'?

Led Zeppelin kept many of the 1929 original's words about the 1927 Mississippi flood, which drove many Black families off the Delta's plantations and north in the Great Migration.

The 1998 China floods prompted the government to blame what upstream cause?

Deforestation upstream took the blame, and within months Beijing announced two vast programmes, one to protect natural forests and one to turn hillside farmland back into trees.

Record monsoon floods in 2022 affected some 33 million people in which country?

Pakistan's climate minister said a third of the country was under water; UN satellite maps put the flooded area at about 75,000 square kilometres, nearer a tenth.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family as they flee the Dust Bowl for the West?

The Grapes of Wrath sends the Joads west in search of honest work, only to meet scorn and exploitation instead of the promised land they had hoped for.

Which party won a landslide a month after the Bhola cyclone, amid anger at Pakistan's response?

The Awami League won all but two of East Pakistan's seats; when the government in the west refused to accept the result, protest turned to war and, within a year, independence.

Which 1998 hurricane, the deadliest in Central American history, brought catastrophic floods to Honduras and Nicaragua?

Mitch had weakened to a Category 1 by landfall, yet it moved so slowly across Honduras that days of rain, not wind, caused the disaster.

Which Florida city took the brunt of Hurricane Andrew's Category 5 landfall in 1992?

Homestead lost more than 99 percent of its mobile homes, and the flimsy building that Andrew exposed pushed Florida to adopt far stricter construction codes.

Which hurricane surpassed Andrew as Florida's costliest, 25 years later?

Irma set off one of the largest evacuations in US history: some six million Floridians were told to leave the coast, jamming the highways north.

After Hurricane Maria, which US territory raised its official death toll from 64 to 2,975?

Puerto Rico's government held to its count of 64 for nearly a year, until a university study it had commissioned found a toll almost 50 times higher.

On which island did Hurricane Maria make landfall at Category 5 strength?

Dominica's prime minister posted live updates as the storm tore the roof off his own residence, then had to be rescued when the house began to flood.

The US 'Hurricane Hunters' gather data for storm forecasts by doing what?

Flying into the storm was first tried in 1943, when an Army pilot took a small training plane into a hurricane over Texas and showed that it could be done.

Hurricane Sandy flooded New York's subways in 2012 after coming ashore in which nearby state?

New Jersey took the landfall after Sandy turned toward the coast, but the storm was so vast that its surge also poured into New York's subway tunnels.

Which island did the Great Hurricane of 1780, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, strike first?

Barbados was devastated first; the toll ran so high partly because British and French war fleets were crowded among the islands, fighting over them during the American Revolution.

The 1976 Tangshan earthquake struck six weeks before the death of which Chinese leader?

Mao Zedong died that September; the quake had struck at 3:42 in the morning, when nearly everyone was asleep indoors, which is why so many were crushed.

Thousands of children died in collapsed classrooms when a 2008 earthquake struck which region of China?

Sichuan's grieving parents blamed shoddy 'tofu-dreg' building for the collapse of thousands of classrooms, and a teacher who posted photos of the ruins was detained.

Mount St. Helens, which blew apart in May 1980, stands in which US state?

Washington cities far downwind went dark in the daytime: the eruption blew some 540 million tons of ash eastward, and it fell as far away as the Great Plains.

The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake was so deadly partly because many people lived in cave homes known as what?

Yaodongs are dug into cliffs of soft loess, which collapsed on the families sleeping inside and set off landslides that buried many more.

The first shock of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes struck closest to which city?

Gaziantep's hilltop castle, a stronghold since Roman times that had watched over the city for nearly 2,000 years, was badly damaged when the ground shook.

Which Turkish city, the ancient Antioch, was left largely in ruins by the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes?

Antakya lost whole neighbourhoods along with landmarks such as St Paul's church and the Habib-i Neccar Mosque, leaving thousands of its people homeless.

The 2015 Nepal earthquake set off a deadly avalanche that struck climbers camped on which peak?

Mount Everest's Base Camp was packed with a record 359 climbers, many of them back after the 2014 climbs were abandoned, when the wall of snow and ice swept through.

The nine-storey Dharahara tower collapsed in a 2015 earthquake in which Asian capital?

Kathmandu got its landmark back six years later: a replica of the tower was opened on the eve of the earthquake's anniversary in April 2021.

The 1964 Alaska earthquake, North America's most powerful on record, struck on which day of the Christian calendar?

Good Friday, 27 March 1964: the ground shook for about four and a half minutes, yet the shaking itself killed few people; most of the roughly 130 victims died in the tsunamis and landslides that followed.

Which Alaskan city lost about 75 homes when its Turnagain neighbourhood slid toward the sea in the 1964 earthquake?

Anchorage lay about 75 miles from the epicentre, yet a bluff resting on clay gave way beneath the Turnagain neighbourhood; part of the wrecked ground is now Earthquake Park.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake was so destructive partly because the city sits on which drained lakebed?

Texcoco's old lakebed is soft, wet clay that amplified the shaking even though the epicentre lay more than 350 km away; the Aztecs had built their capital on islands in the lake.

Which Japanese port city was devastated by the Great Hanshin earthquake of January 1995?

Kobe lay just 20 km from the epicentre; about 6,400 people died, Japan's worst earthquake toll in more than seventy years, and stretches of the elevated Hanshin Expressway collapsed.

Which New Zealand city lost 185 people in a February 2011 earthquake?

Christchurch's quake was only a little over magnitude 6, but it broke just 5 km underground, close to the city centre, at lunchtime on a working day, so the damage far outstripped its size.

Which Philippine volcano's 1991 eruption, the 20th century's second largest, cooled the whole planet by about half a degree?

Pinatubo erupted just as a typhoon passed over; the rain-soaked ash grew heavy enough to collapse thousands of roofs, and those collapses caused most of the roughly 850 deaths.

Which US air base on Luzon was evacuated days before a giant 1991 eruption and handed over that same year?

Clark Air Base sent more than 15,000 people away before the blast; ash and lahars then wrecked it, and that November the US lowered its flag and handed the base to the Philippine government.

Hours before the 1985 Nevado del Ruiz mudflows, what did officials tell townspeople to do?

Stay calm indoors, said the mayor on the radio and a priest over the church loudspeaker as ash fell; a hazard map finished weeks earlier had shown the danger but was poorly distributed.

Which Icelandic fissure erupted for eight months from June 1783, spreading a poisonous haze across Europe?

Laki's gases stunted the grass and killed most of Iceland's livestock, and the 'Haze Famine' that followed took about a fifth of the island's people.

Which American founding father suggested in 1784 that a summer-long 'dry fog' over Europe might have come from an Icelandic volcano?

Benjamin Franklin, then living near Paris, went a step further: he reasoned that the fog had weakened the sun's rays all summer, so the ground stored too little heat and a bitter winter followed.

Why did the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud close much of Europe's airspace?

Ash melts inside engines and chokes them: in 1982 a British Airways 747 flew into a volcanic plume over Java and lost all four engines before the crew managed to restart them.

Past Eyjafjallajökull eruptions have often been followed by eruptions of which larger neighbour?

Katla lies under an ice cap, so its eruptions unleash huge meltwater floods; it last erupted in 1918, and in 2010 Iceland's president called the smaller volcano's outburst only a 'small rehearsal'.

The 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption produced the largest what ever recorded by modern instruments?

Atmospheric explosion: the blast sent pressure waves around the globe and was heard as a series of bangs in Alaska, more than 9,000 km away.

The undersea 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption blasted a record amount of what into the stratosphere?

Water vapour, enough to fill 58,000 Olympic pools, reached the stratosphere because the vent sat about 150 m down: deep enough to superheat plenty of seawater, shallow enough for the blast to break through.

Which gas burst from Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986, killing more than 1,700 people in nearby villages?

Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so the cloud sank to the ground and rolled down the valleys, suffocating people and livestock up to 25 km from the lake.

What colour did Lake Nyos's blue water turn after its 1986 gas burst?

Deep red, or a rusty reddish brown to witnesses: the burst hauled iron-rich deep water to the surface, where the air turned it to rust, and the lake's level fell by about a metre.

Which rare type of eruption, seen at Cameroon's Lake Nyos, happens when dissolved gas bursts from deep lake water?

Limnic eruptions are on record only twice, both in Cameroon: 37 people died at Lake Monoun in 1984, two years before Nyos. Pipes now siphon up the deep water of both lakes so the gas bubbles out slowly.

Which informal gauge do US disaster officials use, judging a storm's severity by whether a 24-hour diner chain stays open?

The Waffle House Index tracks whether the chain's diners are open with a full menu, a limited menu or closed; the chain reopens so reliably after storms that a shut branch signals real trouble.

Which Missouri city did an EF5 tornado tear apart in May 2011?

Joplin's tornado killed about 160 people, the most of any in the United States since 1947. It wrecked one of the city's two hospitals, and investigators later urged that hospitals be built to keep running through a tornado.

Which Oklahoma City suburb was struck by top-rated tornadoes in both 1999 and 2013?

Moore's 1999 tornado was heading into so crowded an area that forecasters wrote a new kind of alert on the spot, the first 'tornado emergency', to show this was no ordinary warning.

Which college city was struck by an EF4 tornado on 27 April 2011, the peak day of the Super Outbreak?

Tuscaloosa's tornado was shown live from television tower cameras as it crossed the city; it stayed on the ground for about 80 miles, grew up to 1.5 miles wide and killed more than 60 people.

Which state suffered by far the most deaths in the April 2011 Super Outbreak of tornadoes?

Alabama's toll was 238. One tornado there cut the outside power lines feeding the Browns Ferry nuclear plant, and all three of its reactors shut down automatically.

The deadliest tornado in history struck which country in April 1989, killing about 1,300?

Bangladesh's Manikganj district took the blow: the tornado cut a track up to a mile wide, levelled the towns of Saturia and Manikganj and left about 80,000 people homeless.

Which Alaskan bay was swept in 1958 by the tallest tsunami ever recorded?

Lituya Bay's wave began when an earthquake shook a mass of rock into a narrow inlet, and it stripped trees 524 metres up the slopes; a father and his 7-year-old son, anchored in their fishing boat, rode over it and lived.

The Japanese word 'tsunami' literally means what?

Harbour wave, from tsu, harbour, and nami, wave. English borrowed the word in 1896, and scientists prefer it to 'tidal wave' because these waves have nothing to do with the tides.

Park ranger Roy Sullivan, struck by lightning seven times, worked in which national park?

Shenandoah's 'human lightning conductor' was hit seven times between 1942 and 1977: the strikes cost him a toenail, burned off his eyebrows and twice set his hair on fire, yet he survived them all.

Ted Fujita's original 13-level tornado rating was designed to link the Beaufort scale to what?

Mach number: Fujita spaced twelve steps between hurricane-force wind on the Beaufort scale and the speed of sound, yet only F0 to F5 were ever used in practice.

Tornado scientist Ted Fujita also discovered which sudden wind hazard that can slam landing airliners into the ground?

Microbursts came to light when Fujita studied the 1975 crash of an Eastern Air Lines jet on approach to New York's JFK; he found that cells of intense downdraft in a thunderstorm had driven it down.

What do scientists call a ground-hugging avalanche of scorching ash, rock and gas that races down a volcano's slopes?

A pyroclastic flow usually moves faster than 80 km/h at 200 to 700 °C, hot enough to start fires and to melt snow and ice in its path into floods of mud.

Which process, triggered by earthquake shaking, makes firm, waterlogged ground behave like quicksand, sinking and tilting buildings?

Liquefaction happens when loose, waterlogged sediment loses its strength under shaking; it destroyed so many buildings in Niigata, Japan, in 1964 that engineers began to take the hazard seriously.

The Volcanic Explosivity Index ranks eruptions chiefly by what?

Volume ejected, with the height of the ash column: so Hawaii's quiet lava eruptions rate 0, and Alaska's little-known 1912 Novarupta blast outranks Mount St. Helens with 30 times the magma.

Which effect of Earth's rotation makes hurricanes spin counterclockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it?

The Coriolis effect arises because the ground moves at about 1,040 mph at the equator and hardly at all at the poles, so air rushing toward a storm's centre is bent sideways into a spiral.

The most recent VEI-8 eruption, over 25,000 years ago, occurred at which New Zealand volcano?

Taupō is no towering cone: its eruptions were so violent that the volcano collapsed in on itself, leaving a caldera that is now filled by New Zealand's largest lake.

Which Hawaiian volcano destroyed hundreds of homes in 2018 when lava broke out in the Leilani Estates neighbourhood?

Kīlauea's lava came up through cracks in residential streets far from the summit; as it drained the magma stored below, the summit's lava lake vanished and the crater floor collapsed.

From 1953 until 1979, Atlantic hurricanes were given only which kind of name?

Women's names took over in 1953 from a confusing two-year scheme based on the phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie); men's names joined the Atlantic lists in 1979.

Where in a hurricane are the strongest winds usually found?

The eyewall, a ring of tall thunderstorms, wraps around the calm eye, where winds drop below 15 mph and sinking air clears the sky; people in the eye at night often see stars.

Australian forecaster Clement Wragge, the first to give storms personal names, named some after which group he disliked?

Politicians: Wragge could then report that a namesake was 'causing great distress' or 'wandering aimlessly about the Pacific'. When he retired, the naming of storms lapsed for decades.

An 'orphan tsunami' that reached Japan in January 1700 revealed a giant earthquake on which North American fault zone?

Cascadia's last great quake left no written record in North America, but 'ghost forests' of cedars drowned as the coast sank; their last growth rings date from 1699, matching the wave that reached Japan the following January.

The 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes created which shallow lake in north-west Tennessee?

Reelfoot Lake fills a basin where the ground sank by several metres in the shock of 7 February 1812; water from the Mississippi rushed in, and cypress trees still stand in its shallows.

Which Native American leader's alliance read the New Madrid earthquakes as a sign to support him?

Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader, was recruiting nations to his confederacy when the Great Comet of 1811 and then the earthquakes appeared; many took them as omens, though the Choctaws and Chickasaws still turned him down.

Which Indonesian lake fills the caldera left by a supervolcano's eruption some 74,000 years ago?

Toba's lake, about 100 km long, fills the scar of the largest eruption of at least the last two million years; a famous theory holds that it nearly wiped out early humans, though many researchers now dispute that.

Which Japanese port city was almost entirely destroyed alongside Tokyo in the 1923 Kantō earthquake?

Yokohama burned along with Tokyo: the quake struck at 11:58 am, just as families were cooking lunch over open flames, and the fires that followed caused most of the deaths.

Japan commemorates the 1923 Kantō earthquake each 1 September as what?

Disaster Prevention Day was fixed on the anniversary in 1960; every 1 September local governments and schools across Japan run earthquake and evacuation drills, with well over a million people taking part.

Which type of long-lived, rotating thunderstorm produces the most destructive tornadoes?

A supercell feeds on a tilted, rotating updraft up to 10 miles wide, often visible on radar 20 to 60 minutes before a tornado forms; yet scientists still cannot fully explain why some spawn tornadoes and others do not.

A 1928 hurricane drowned more than 2,500 people when it pushed which Florida lake over its banks?

Lake Okeechobee was held back only by a hastily built mud levee about five feet high; most of the dead were migrant farm workers, and a dike nearly 30 feet high now rings the lake.

Who were the highway workers killed in the Florida Keys by the 1935 Labor Day hurricane?

Veterans of World War I on a federal relief job: the train sent to evacuate them was swept off the track by the storm surge, and Ernest Hemingway, who joined the rescue, wrote the essay 'Who Murdered the Vets?'

Cyclone Tracy struck which Australian city in the early hours of Christmas Day 1974?

Darwin was left without water, power or sanitation, so more than 30,000 of its people were evacuated; the wreckage led Australia to tighten its building codes.

A 1908 asteroid blast flattened a vast stretch of forest in which remote region?

Siberia's Tunguska blast left no crater, because the asteroid exploded in mid-air; the area was so remote that the first scientific expedition did not reach it until 1927.

Cyclone Idai, among the Southern Hemisphere's deadliest storms, made landfall in which country in March 2019?

Mozambique's port of Beira, a city of half a million, took the direct hit: a UN aid worker reported that no building was untouched, and the storm's floods also killed people in Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Which 1979 Pacific typhoon was both the largest and the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded?

Tip spread about 2,220 km across and its central pressure fell to 870 millibars, the lowest ever measured at sea level; yet it weakened before reaching Japan, and fewer than 100 people died.

Which 2015 storm off Mexico became the strongest ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, with winds of 215 mph?

Hurricane Patricia grew from a tropical storm to Category 5 in a single day, then weakened sharply before landfall on a thinly populated stretch of Mexico's coast, so only two people died directly.

By what nickname is the 1938 New England hurricane also known?

The Long Island Express was racing north at 47 mph when it came ashore on Long Island; an estimated 682 people died, and its damage could still be seen thirteen years later.

A 1963 landslide into the reservoir of which Italian dam sent a giant wave over its crest onto the towns below?

Vajont's wave drowned roughly 2,000 people, most of them in the town of Longarone directly below, yet the dam itself was left almost untouched and still stands.

In Oklahoma's 1999 tornado outbreak, three people died sheltering under which structures, now called a deadly choice?

Highway overpasses came to seem safe after a 1991 video of people riding out a Kansas tornado beneath one was shown everywhere; forecasters now say they offer at best questionable shelter.

The 1966 Aberfan disaster, which engulfed a Welsh village school, was the collapse of what?

A coal tip, a heap of colliery waste piled over springs, slid after heavy rain and killed 144 people, 116 of them children; the Coal Board was blamed, yet money from the public disaster fund was taken to clear the other tips.

Which Chinese dam, built to survive a once-in-1,000-years flood, collapsed with 61 others during Typhoon Nina in 1975?

Banqiao was overwhelmed when the stalled typhoon dropped more than a year's worth of rain in a single day.

Which Pacific warming pattern did South American fishermen name for Christmas, the time of year when it usually peaks?

El Niño, short for El Niño de Navidad, sets in when the Pacific trade winds weaken and warm water spreads back east; the jet stream shifts, bringing wetter winters to the US Gulf Coast and drier ones farther north.

Which river, nicknamed 'China's Sorrow', burst its dikes in 1887 and killed at least 900,000 people?

Yellow River water carries so much silt that the bed keeps rising, so the dikes were built ever higher; when they gave way, the flood poured out across the low-lying North China Plain.

The windstorm called a derecho takes its name from the Spanish word for what?

Straight ahead: physicist Gustavus Hinrichs coined 'derecho' in 1888 to set a thunderstorm's one-way winds apart from the rotating winds of a tornado, a word thought to come from the Spanish for 'to turn'.

What causes a meteotsunami, a tsunami-like wave that strikes coasts and lakes?

Fast-moving storm fronts carry a sharp change in air pressure across the water and push up a wave that can top 6 feet; it looks so much like an earthquake's tsunami that the two are hard to tell apart.

A sinkhole that exposes groundwater beneath is called what?

Cenote comes from a Maya word; in Yucatán these natural wells were the main supply of water, and at Chichén Itzá jade, gold and even people were thrown into one as offerings.

Which US national park sits on a supervolcano whose last giant eruption, about 630,000 years ago, laid down the Lava Creek Tuff?

Yellowstone's last giant eruption left a caldera about 30 by 45 miles across, and magma still lies only a few miles below parts of it, which is what keeps the park's geysers and hot springs running.

Which Oklahoma college town houses the Storm Prediction Center?

Norman is home to the University of Oklahoma, whose campus holds the National Weather Center; the tornado forecasters moved in after spending decades in Kansas City.

In which Florida city is the National Hurricane Center based?

Miami's forecasters work about 12 miles west of downtown, on the Florida International University campus, in a building hardened against hurricane winds so that it can keep forecasting through a direct hit.

Most of the world's earthquakes strike along which horseshoe-shaped belt?

The Ring of Fire rims the Pacific, where slabs of ocean floor are sinking beneath neighbouring plates; it produces about 90 percent of all earthquakes and roughly four in five of the very largest.

Giuseppe Mercalli, whose name is on the earthquake intensity scale, was a Catholic priest and what kind of scientist?

Volcanologist: Mercalli directed the Vesuvius Observatory. The scale that bears his name has no mathematical basis; it grades a quake in Roman numerals by what people feel and what breaks.

Which 2022 hurricane put Fort Myers Beach under 10 to 15 feet of water and wrecked the Sanibel Island causeway?

Ian came ashore on the barrier island of Cayo Costa, where Hurricane Charley had also made landfall in 2004; Ian was far the larger storm, drove much more water inland, and more than 150 people died.

What destroyed the potato harvest, starting Ireland's Great Famine in 1845?

A mould, Phytophthora infestans, rotted the crop in the fields; roughly a million people died, yet Ireland went on exporting large quantities of food to Britain.

Which brain chemical triggers solitary desert locusts to switch into their swarming form?

Serotonin runs about three times higher in swarming locusts; in the lab, simply tickling a solitary locust's hind legs, as jostling neighbours would, is enough to tip it into swarm mode.

What does most to pile up a hurricane's storm surge against the coast?

Its winds pushing water ashore do most of the work: low pressure lifts the sea only about a centimetre per millibar, so even a 100-millibar drop adds just a metre. The surge is a hurricane's greatest threat to life.

Doppler radar spots a storm's rotation by tracking the motion of what?

Raindrops blown toward or away from the radar reveal how the air inside the storm is moving, so forecasters can pick out rotation high in the cloud, often before any tornado has touched the ground.

Which type of precipitation causes an ice storm, glazing trees and power lines?

Freezing rain starts as snow, melts in a warm layer aloft and freezes again only when it touches surfaces at or below freezing; a quarter-inch glaze is the US threshold for an ice storm.

Which ancient Greek historian reasoned that the great sea waves he described must be caused by earthquakes?

Thucydides described the sea drawing back from the Greek coast in 426 BC and returning as a huge wave, then wrote that without an earthquake he did not see how such a thing could happen.

What is the scientific study of lightning called?

Fulminology takes its name from fulmen, Latin for lightning; a flash heats the air to about 30,000 °C so suddenly that it expands in a shock wave, which is what we hear as thunder.

California's deadliest wildfire, the 2018 Camp Fire, took its name from what?

A nearby road, Camp Creek Road: no campfire was involved. Failed hardware on a power line set it off, and people or their equipment start more than four in five US wildfires.

The best-known survivor of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption was sheltered by what?

A prison cell, a dungeon with one small grated opening, saved a man serving a week in solitary; badly burned, he was rescued four days later and went on to tour with the Barnum & Bailey circus.

Volcanic winters are caused mainly by droplets of which compound reflecting sunlight?

Sulfuric acid droplets form when volcanic sulfur dioxide reacts high in the stratosphere; the ash, by contrast, falls out within days or weeks and has little effect on the climate.

At Pompeii, archaeologists recreated victims' final poses by pouring what into the hollows their bodies left in the ash?

Plaster did it: in the 1860s Giuseppe Fiorelli realised that voids in the hardened ash were the shapes of decayed bodies. The town lies under roughly six metres of ash and pumice.

Which weather word comes from an Arabic word for 'season'?

Monsoon comes from the Arabic mawsim by way of Portuguese; the name fits, because monsoon winds reverse with the time of year, bringing a wet season and a dry one.

NASA calculated that the magnitude 8.8 earthquake of February 2010 shortened what by about a microsecond?

The day should have shortened by about 1.26 millionths of a second, by a NASA scientist's model of how the quake shifted the planet's mass; the axis that mass balances on moved about 8 centimetres.

Along which tectonic boundary did the deadly 1999 Turkish earthquake near İzmit occur?

The North Anatolian Fault broke at about 3 am, when people were asleep in badly built apartment blocks; more than 17,000 died, and contractors who had used cheap materials were prosecuted.

About how many animals did Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer fires kill or displace, by a WWF-backed estimate?

About 3 billion mammals, reptiles, birds and frogs were killed or driven from their habitat, most of them reptiles; an earlier estimate of 1.25 billion had covered only two states.

Which Texas port on Matagorda Bay, now a ghost town, was wrecked by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886?

Indianola was the second port of Texas until the 1875 hurricane killed hundreds; it was rebuilt, only to be wiped out in 1886 by a second hurricane and a fire, and it lost its county seat that year.